As/Is







8.20.2008


Errancy & the Meaning of "Mango"

Eavesdropping, shamelessly, amongst the clatter of business-day cups and
loose change exchanged at a favorite, local, blue-collar, coffee shop, “Blue
Horses: A Series of Events Seemingly Mundane” stumbles upon “real life.”
It’s not the unvarnished truth “Blue Horses: A Series of Events Seemingly
Mundane” records but a facsimile, the fleshed-out approximations of voice foreshadowed unerringly, rewound, and played back: “Don’t look now but isn’t
that your long-lost love waiting for the bus across the street?” says a man,
a shop keeper, who nudges his friend sitting next to him at the counter.
A) His friend looks. He doesn’t see. Or doesn’t want to see. B) His friend
doesn’t look and sees her forever as the girl he remembers, who left him
because of the wrong words all the time. The friend turns to the shop keeper
“She wanted words drizzled over her like honey on shortbread. Plagiarism
killed that romance not silence like so many guys tell me killed theirs.
The word mango for instance. I looked up this poem about mangos once…well,
not about mangos per se but about the word "mango" itself it turned out…
and tried to impress her with the beauty of this poem about mangos: ‘I love
you much as I do the word mango dripping from my tongue’ I recited. She
only got huffy when I asked her if she liked what I’d written. She paused,
sensed it wasn’t mine, called it inauthentic, fraudulent, ersatz, plagiarized.
'Well, Christ,’ I snarled, ‘damn a man for trying to be romantic.’ ‘Words,
if one is in love, flow like water down a brook’ she said. Always sounded
like some book. She left me a week later, claimed I didn’t know who I was
'cause I copied poems.” A man, sitting on the other side of the shop keeper
at the counter, chuckles then pauses, thinking it an odd conclusion. The
friend just grins uneasily and blows calmly on his coffee, hoping to forget
the entire affair. “Blue Horses: A Series of Events Seemingly Mundane” has
overheard enough but keeps thinking about what he’s heard & the significance
of the word mango. Has “Blue Horses: A Series of Events Seemingly Mundane”
missed the point? Some errant thing has taken root. “Blue Horses: A Series
of Events Seemingly Mundane” just sits there saying it over & over, softly
like a prayer: mango mango mango mango mango mango mango mango.